Monday, December 7, 2009

I'm in the early stages of a CRAZILY-deadlined project overseeing and administering the translation of 200+ pages (60 individual documents) into 16 languages, which I will then collate into one document per language. By January 4th.

I've received 1 document so far in each language. For the math challenged (like me with my handy behind-the-scenes calculator), this is 3200 pages. (Plus 200 more in English). Which I will gather, validate, collate, index, hyperlink, and distribute. In 27 days. 8 of which are weekend days and 4 of which are American holidays.

Anybody who has worked this kind of project can perhaps appreciate the level of insanity this is inspiring in me. And the way in which I'm kissing spending any quality holiday time with my family goodbye.

However, since this is a technical writing blog, I'll suppress my inner horrors and ask just the wordnerd question:

When working with English-to-XXX languages (European, African, Asian, SE Asian, and so forth), what sources have you/do you look to for advice in order to create the most impactful, culturally appropriate (in format) technical work?

At this point, I'm relying on my experience performing this same task for Western European language translations, and I'm trying to self-educate on how to make these documents most useful for Asian, Cyrillic and Central European readers as well. Times 17.